


What I Want For Myself

by YesBothWays



Series: Supergirl's sexuality [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, F/M, and not James?, hm., why are all the tags Jimmy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 01:04:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8645194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesBothWays/pseuds/YesBothWays
Summary: This story depicts Kara alone, in between relationships, and thinking over her sexuality.  It’s set in a slightly modified AU where she had a good relationship with James at the end of s1 that ended in a return to friendship and has been getting closer with Lena.  Kara would have been with James during the time when Alex came out and got into her first relationships with women.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Supergirl is a beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world, too pure. Her sexuality would also be too good for this world, too pure. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I felt so sad when evil Supergirl had a stronger sexuality than she does when she's herself. I keep thinking, if we could imagine Kara’s sexuality being a real presence in the show, instead of being such a shifting and unformed part of how she’s imagined, what might it be like?

            The city was experiencing the commonplace miracle of a quiet evening, and I was well overdue for a night in. So I checked my phone to make sure I would get any alerts from the DEO, put some music on to help me block out the sounds of the city, and made one of my “disgusting power bomb” smoothies, as Alex called them, by stuffing a blender with as much Greek yogurt, cream, protein powder, bananas, frozen fruit, oats, coconut oil, and honey as I could make fit. I chugged through that little beauty while I placed a mammoth take out order from three different places, and I got myself set up for cooking my way through a quadruple batch of pancakes to stash away in the fridge for breakfast or other desperate moments. I was never much good at taking time for myself. But whenever I finally did, the first order of business always had to be food. Food first. Ask pending and overdue life questions later.

            I’m not very good at being alone. A lot of epic warrior types love to get all pensive and go inward and favor solitude. That so called “way of the warrior” is certainly not my way of being a warrior. Whatever that thing is – some kind of detachment or enlightenment or mind over the matter thing – that is just not me. When I’m alone, I like to still feel the press of how close I’ve been with other people. Memories of my friends make me smile and laugh, even when I’m on my own. I like it. It makes my life feel like it’s filled with sunlight and family. Those are the things that make life worth living, even if everything else gets taken away.

            Tonight, I kept thinking about Lena. She had asked me to let her take me out to dinner a couple of nights before. In the rush of a crazy week, I hadn’t thought to notice it was the first time we had spent time together without any other reason or pretense. That seemed right. We were up to that step. It happened simply without my noticing. I kept laughing over something she had said, “If you let other people decide who you are, they’ll write you a whole book about yourself. They’ll write you a whole life if you let them. And while you may get lucky and end up with a Mr. Rochester instead of a St. John, you won’t end up with a life of your own and the room you need to find someone actually worth wanting for yourself.”

            Maybe it was because I talked to her some about James and the year we had spent dating and how that had ended but had also ended well, but I found myself leaning my hips into the counter and noticing the open, empty feeling of my place. I found myself feeling like it would be nice to find someone to date again soon. I felt pretty lucky in love already. But I certainly wouldn’t mind finding even more luck. I might stumble across the right person soon, or rather, another right person of the ones I would eventually find in my life, someone worth wanting for myself.

            I felt a little worried over whether there would be space in my life. James and I fit, because he was already so much a part of everything else that was crowding my mind. We were already together, before we got together. Plus, he was a great choice. I had kind of stumbled through my first relationship. I could get lost for a while or bump into James, and James wasn’t frail. I could fall into James, and he would catch me and set me up on my own two feet again. Funny how I can see the Guardian in him even then when I think back now. Funny that I didn’t see it then. He was a great first crush, especially since that one is by definition such a formative one.

            I found myself remembering how difficult it all was for me then. I always thought that love, romance, sex were supposed to be easy. I thought if it didn’t feel easy, you were doing it wrong: you picked the wrong person, you were making things difficult for yourself, you were just immature. I thought it was all supposed to just all into place. I definitely didn’t think I would need anyone’s help. I didn’t even think I’d need any help from whoever I would be with and certainly not anybody else. It was quiet the ways I learned what it was really like, hard to name. But I knew now that my relationships to myself, my sexuality, my friends, my feelings, and the people I would date were all woven together. I wasn’t going to step out of my own life and into another one just because I fell in love. And I wouldn’t really want it that way.

            I guess I always thought I could just work it out on my own, you know? Just show up all of a sudden totally ready. Even though I knew from experience that life doesn’t work that way. If anybody knew how much we all need people to make room for us, to help us find what it is we need, to move through the nerve wracking, timid work of finding our own, unique way of matching up with a world that feels like it could sweep by and leave us behind, take a sudden notice and crush us on purpose, or maybe just trample us under without even noticing, it was me. But I just thought, you know, sex is pretty simple, just basic biology that we pretty much all share. So I will make sure it's simple for me. And I avoided everyone I liked for years and years. I said I would just eventually find the right boy and follow the steps. Respond normally. Psht! Hah! I was never that woman I imagined I could be a day in my life.

            James and me were right over there on my couch the first time we made out. And I got up the nerve to invite him to my room. We made out on my bed for a long time. And I even got up the nerve to take his shirt off. I had always loved how bad of a liar James was in everyday life, his face and body language giving him away. Now I got to see the reverse and even better side of this trait. The way he moved up and helped me get his shirt off, I couldn’t question how he felt about it. The consent was written all over him and didn’t leave much room for confusion. The first time we kissed, and he went so blank, everything felt terribly complicated. This was so much easier than that and washed away my lingering fear.

            That night, I leaned up a few times to look down over James’s back. He was so beautiful to me, the shape of him, even the way he moved. I felt like that was the wrong thing to say, so I didn’t say it. Instead, the feeling of it burned in my chest, while I wished I could let it out some way. It wasn’t quite like blushing. It was a lot hotter than that, like flying close to the sun at the edge of the atmosphere. Sex felt crazy to me already, and I’d only taken those first handful of steps into it. I can’t say I felt scared. But I definitely felt overwhelmed, especially realizing there must be a whole lot more left. I think I realized I really didn’t know what it was going to be like.

            We made out for a long time, somewhere between relaxing into it and getting even more worked up by each other.   This was going okay, I thought. I wasn’t a complete freak. But I also thought I looked too much. Or maybe, I looked too directly. You weren’t supposed to look like that: the camera was supposed to be all angles; the lighting all dimmed. I probably would have kept that impression if James hadn’t noticed. But he did notice. And he leaned back to give me better look at him and gave a grin when I did look. He got up and put another lamp on, across the room. He took off the pants he was wearing and dropped them on the back of a chair. I was biting my lip when he crawled back into the bed on his knees wearing only a pair of boxers.    

            I instantly began to regret that I had worn a dress that night. I felt like I’d have to take it off completely to get it out of the way. And while I was having a great time, I wasn’t all that keen on the idea of getting naked all that fast. I guess it’s weird thinking back, but I felt like a nerd with the cloth of my dress pressing up against the bare skin of his chest. And I don’t mean like a nerd in the good way where I knew how to love imaginative things that made me happy.

            I must have gotten tense in my awkwardness, because James chilled things out and we ended up talking a little. Finally, I undid the buttons on my dress and got it off my shoulders, and I felt comfortable that it would be clear that I didn’t really want to take it off. I stayed nervous while were kissing again and James kissed all along the bare skin of my neck and shoulders, even though I was really, really into it. James’s hands were on my waist where my dress was bunched up.

            “Do you want to keep this on?” he said.

            “Yeah,” I said.

            He just kept kissing me in the same way he was before. I realized even then that I was surprised that he had taken that in stride, much less that he had openly asked me, and I had to recognize that I thought I was going to make a wrong move and ruin everything. I was struggling with this inhibition where I thought that if I had said something myself, things would have stopped completely. And that’s clearly not what was happening. Something that made much more sense was actually happening. I was in bed with my actual friend who wanted to know what I wanted to do before making up his mind about what we should be doing together.

            That freed things up for me. I got out of my head. I got into my body. The way I remember the rest of the night is a strange form of memory, mostly physical, like it’s stored in my body even more than my mind. And it wasn’t like something was happening to me, and I was trying to decide what to do in response and worried about making the wrong choice. It was like something else entirely, something taking shape while the two of us made our way through that night along with each other. I can’t remember when my bra came off, but it did. I know we kind of both got rid of it at the same time like it was a little in the way. I don’t remember when I went from feeling my back arch at James’s hands moving along my thighs under the skirt of my dress to making sounds that fell somewhere between a gasp and a cry at the feel of James’s hand between my legs.

            “Is this too much?” James asked me.

            My lips were pursed. I made a rapid shake of my head. He got the message but focused harder on my expression.  

            “You seem really tense,” he said gently and put his hand on my exposed ribs as if to feel it.

            “I’m uh –“

            My voice came out in a kind of breathless squeak. I tried to breath a little freer so I could speak clearly. I shifted in the bed even while I deliberately tensed most of my muscles.

            “I’m trying not to be... too strong,” I said.

            James’s expression made it obvious that he didn’t understand that, but he stopped worrying about me. We stayed up late. James stayed over. He slept in his boxers. I kept touching his skin even in the dark after we turned off the lights. He was so relaxed by the feel of my hand that he fell asleep. So I kept touching him until I finally felt ready to allow a night so beautiful and important to me to end. Then I fell asleep.

            We had enough time to put together breakfast the next morning. Then we got a call from the DEO, and we rushed through eating and flew in. The rest of the workweek carried us along. I got especially bashful around James at work, careful not to physically bump into him when we met unexpectedly in the copy room. I could help but smile and laugh and dodge out of the way as quick as I could.

            “We’re okay, right?” he finally said, not too worried, but a little confused.

            “We’re good. We are good. We’re good together,” I said and gave him something like a scout’s salute and pretty much ran away.

            “Okay,” he said to my back. “You free Friday night?”

            “Yep,” I called back over my shoulder with looking and nearly skipped into my office to hide.

            I could barely wait. I was so excited. But I was really nervous, too, and I had to admit it. We stayed in Friday night. After we had eaten and talked about the week, I felt that space opening out where we would decide what we would do next.

            “Can we talk?” I said.

            We’d been talking for more than an hour. James squinted and tried to decipher the question. He had given a reflexive start of a nod before deciding he didn’t know what I meant.

            “I’ve been thinking… about us. About sex. About sex between us.”

            I blanched at the pain of that start. James just nodded. From looking at him, you would have thought I had been acting totally normal around him and was still being totally normal now.

            “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, too,” he said.

            “Have you?” I asked.

            “Yes. And I’m willing to take responsibility for things. There’s no way any kind of human birth control is going to work for you. And you shouldn’t have to go to the DEO for something so personal. There’s stuff that will definitely work on me. We should talk it through. And besides, why should women bear all the burden of this stuff anyways? It’s had me thinking about it more.”

            “Oh, geeze. I actually hadn’t thought about any of that. Which I should have. I guess I’m even less prepared for this conversation than I thought.”

            “Okay… sorry. I was trying to make you less nervous just now, but that has clearly backfired. Look, I didn’t mean to rush forward. I’m not expecting you to do anything you don’t want to do, Kara. I just thought that if we –”

            “What if I hurt you?” I interrupted him.

            James’s chin tucked a bit, and his eyebrows went up. He didn’t hear the nervousness in my voice. And he clearly misunderstood me.

            “Is that what you’re into?”

            “No. Uh, well, I don’t know about that, actually. I definitely haven’t gotten that far. What I mean is, what if you get hurt? Not in like a fun, sexy way, but in a broken and bleeding, terrible way?”

            “Oh. That’s what you’re worried about?”

            “Yes, that is what I’m worried about. Aren’t you?”

            “No. Not really. I completely trust you, Kara.”

            “But I mean sex, it’s different – it’s all about losing inhibition, right? It’s all about letting go, and that’s just not a good idea for me.”

            “Sex is all kinds of things, Kara. I think you’re overthinking this and getting freaked out by an idea in your mind, not something that’s going to really happen.”

            “Yeah, maybe. Maybe you’re right.”

            “I’m right. Everybody gets nervous about sex.”

            “I am not nervous,” I said and pointed my finger at him like a weapon.

            “That defiant finger is shaking on you,” James said with a poised calm and pointed faintly with his chin.

            I looked down, and it was. I had to retreat. James reached out, got me by the hips, and pulled me closer.

            “Look, both our lives are really stressful. Let’s just relax and ease into this. This is a good thing. Okay?”

            I took a deep breath and nodded. James slipped his hand up the back of my shirt to caress the small of my back. I couldn’t help but giggle, and he smiled and pulled me in closer. We were kissing then, and I wasn’t thinking for a while. I realized my hands were gripping James’s collar tight on instinct. The cloth was too yielding in my fists for me to be hurting him. I think somehow seeing that finally helped me to relax.

            It had been good from the very start. But it was even more good after that talk. And it only got better during the months after that. We settled into kind of a pattern where it was comfortable but also exciting, and sometimes James would want to talk about sex. He was always really casual about bringing it up. He’d ask me big questions like they were ordinary. Is it good between us? Is there anything that you don’t like? Is there anything else you want to try?

            I would get defensive, protective, really, of our relationship. Then James would just solider on and say how he felt and what he liked and what he might want to try. And I would try to chill out and think, but for a long time, I couldn’t come up with any answers for him.

            Finally, I did come up with something. I think it had been in the back of my mind from the start. But even after it came to the forefront, I kept it hidden from anyone else. I never talked to James about it, but his questions kept bringing my mind back to it. So finally, I talked to the person I needed to talk to about it first. Alex came over to my apartment one evening. We were in my kitchen. I was getting some things from the fridge, and she was leaning into the counter still in her coat.

            “Do you remember that cage that you saved me from that guard from Rozz made? The one with the light that simulated the red sun on Krypton?” I said giving her no preface and trying to sound as casual as possible.

            Alex was looking away from me when I spoke, scanning the room in a habitual way that I once thought was because she was so high-strung and now recognized as an agent’s trained instinct, and she turned to me. She didn’t know where I was going with this. She caught something funny in my tone already though. She had turned just a bit on her heel to face me more fully and I could perceive a veiled, sharper focus in her look.  

            “Yeah, sure. Why?” Alex said.

            “Well, I was just wondering if you could make a light like that one. For me, just, for myself to use. And also if you could not tell anyone else about it, ever?”

            Alex knew what I was talking about I could see. But she didn’t understand what it was coming from. The fact that she was going to ask my why was building in my chest as a pressure. And I wrung my knuckles.  

            “You want to restrict your strength?” she asked to clarify.

            I closed my eyes and nodded, almost combative already.

            “Yes. That’s what I’m asking. Will you make me a secret strength suppressing light?”

            Alex was really focusing hard on me now and not hiding it. She could read me. And she looked the tiniest bit worried.

            “It’s not for anything bad. And you don’t have to do it. You can just forget I asked.”

            I tried to get casual and back peddle and made a nervous laugh. Alex’s eyebrows went up, and she came with her eyebrows tight together and got her hands on my arms. She rubbed them as if she were warming me up. I took a deep breath to relax.

            “I can help you get whatever you need, Kara.”  

            Alex must’ve really been worried, because she got her arms around me then. I had told myself a hundred times in my mind that this wasn’t a big deal, but now that I approached it, I was kind of a wreck. I felt all shaky. My stomach growled audibly.

            “Starting with a stack of pizzas,” Alex said and made me laugh.

            That whole night I could feel Alex holding back on asking me why I wanted the red light. I felt so relieved that she didn’t. But I developed this insecurity that I tried to ignore that she wasn’t going to actually do it. I guess I thought she’d make me wait and tell her what it was for before she would start working on it. She brought a black duffle bag over not even two weeks later. She sat it beside the couch, and when we sat down beside one another, she showed me the light she had made me.

            “I didn’t know how strong to make it. So I made the switch adjustable, and it locks in place once you find the right setting. I thought it was dangerous to make it at first. But it’s just a glass bulb, so even at its weakest setting, if you needed to, you could hit it or throw something and break it. You’ll have to block out all the UV rays where you are for it to work. So I made you some suped-up blackout curtains. You use magnets to hang them.”

            I buried my head against Alex’s shoulder. She laughed a bit and held onto me tight for a minute. I felt her kiss the hair on the top of my head.

            “It’s for sex, Alex,” I said in a rush when I leaned up, and I felt my face and chest get hot right away.

            “I mean, obviously, Kara,” Alex said in soft rush of breath, not quite suppressing a smile.

            Alex rubbed her hand through her hair. She put her arm around me, across the back of the couch. I cleared my throat and straightened my shoulders to get proud. I rested both my hands on Alex’s arm.

            “I should’ve thought to ask you about this,” Alex said. “I wanted to give you privacy or space or something. I don’t know. Maybe I was just too awkward myself to ask what you needed. Sorry, Kara.”

            “No, I should be more brave about this stuff.”

            Alex made something like a scoff. She took my hand. As she spoke, she got our fingers entwined and squeezed before letting go.

            “You know, I may not be an outsider the way you are or caught living a double life to the same degree. But I think I’m pretty brave. And _this_ stuff – this stuff has scared me in a way that nothing else ever has been able to scare me. It’s like it gets to a different place inside you than anything else does, someplace deeper and more vulnerable. I guess we think it should be easy for us to know what we want and go after our desires. We think that’s what everyone else is doing. I think we’re all just pretending, mostly. There are all these things we think that we’re supposed to want, because we were taught that, either explicitly or implicitly. So we’re all afraid that we won’t want the right things, and even more afraid once we begin to know what we really want.”

            We were quiet for a minute. The relief that washed over me made me tired. Alex ran a lock of my hair through her fingers, absently.

            “Did you hurt James?” Alex asked me, being super gentle with me.

            “Oh, no,” I said as I realized she was worried and not sure what to imagine. “I just want something I can’t get.”

            I nearly choked up when she looked at my face as I spoke. But I sat up fully and kept going.

            “I want to feel release. Not, pent up all the time, making sure I don’t lose too much control.”

            “Yeah,” Alex said as if that made clear sense to her the very moment I said it aloud. “Surrender is one of the best parts of sex. Among many other really good parts.”

            Alex grew both delighted and abashed implying things about her own love life. And I laughed and felt overjoyed. We were both getting to a good place.

            It still took me three full weeks before I hauled the bag over to James’s place and asked whether he wanted to try using the light with me. He didn’t really get it at first and seemed a little worried about my motivation. But when I explained about what I wanted to experience, then he got excited. He helped me set up his room, stopping to kiss me and drive me slightly wild every time we finished a window. At one point, my hands on his back felt him make a deep laugh as he felt how excited I was getting about this. He loved me. Sometimes, it became impossible not to feel it when we were this close. I ended up tearing his shirt before we could get the light blocked out, and he just laughed out loud at that.

            I checked all the seams on the windows and focused on feeling whether I could sense any light was coming in through the cracks. When I turned around, James had the pillows crushed under his knees. He was carefully getting the light placed so it would shine over the entire bed and wouldn’t fall down on our heads. He moved back to look at it, then he turned to see if I though it was good. The way he was leaning back and all stretched out, my brain just got overloaded.

            “Bwwwaaah. You’re so sexy,” I said.

            “Come and get me, then,” James said with a grin and the flick of an eyebrow.

            I clambered up and kissed him just a tad rough. Then I tried getting just a little less inhibited with each kiss. I was still holding back, though. Long habits die hard.

            “Is it working?” James asked finally.

            “I don’t know.”

            “Here,” James said and climbed out of bed.

            He scrambled around in his closet. When a coat fell, he tossed it roughly to the side. He came out with a wooden baseball bat.

            “Try and break this,” James said.

            I spent the next few minutes trying. First, I tried it just in the air with my hands. The sensation of the bat not splintering in my hands was like being on another world. Like being on my own world, I realized. I hadn’t thought about how it would feel like that.  The sensation was so familiar and yet so strange. I found that it almost made me feel dizzied. Then I tried breaking the skinniest part of the bat over my thigh. I never even got it to crack.

            I remember so clearly the sound the bat made as it rattled against the floor, ringing like an odd, wooden bell, while I threw my arms around James’s neck. I let my arms squeeze as hard as I wanted to. I allowed my hands to press against the familiar shape of the muscles in his back. I couldn’t explain. It was like I could feel them more. If touch is a sense that’s close enough I can compare it to sound, it was like muffs had been taken off my sense of touch that had been there for years.

            James dragged in the softest rush of breath when I let him go.

            “You’re still stronger than me,” he said, and I felt his arm tighten around my waist and his back strain. “And I still can’t lift you up.”

            “The light’s not gonna’ change my molecular density,” I said and tried not to laugh at the idea.

            “I’m just experimenting amidst all the newness,” James said, his softened voice calling me out for having wanted to tease him just then.

            I hugged him close for a long minute. Then I leaned back to get a good look at his face. My hands clenched into fists in my excitement, and I bounced back on my knees.

            “Can I be on top?” I said.

            “Hell yes,” James said without even a flicker of hesitancy.

            I cried over it afterwards. When I broke out crying, James got scared for a second, then he looked closer at me and got a better sense of what was happening. I tried to tell Alex about it a couple days later. I came up short and didn’t use very many words. She reached across the table to touch my hand.

            “I know,” Alex said. “I know.”

            She didn’t have any words either. But she knew exactly what I was talking about. When you finally get something you want, you’re not scared anymore. You’re something else entirely. Maybe we don’t name it, because we are so afraid of it before it arrives. It’s something akin to joy and gratitude, something akin to fulfillment and feeling safe. But none of those words can form quite the right shape to picture what it's like. I can’t say I believe that having sex changes you. You're not a different person before you've had sex than afterwards. But there’s something that can happen in sex – the fulfillment of longing, finding the place where desire and experience finally meet, experiencing the deeper reality of consent that lies beyond the shallow and interpersonal concept we often use when we speak of consent – and that experience changes you. It’s a paradox of feeling both profound strength and profound vulnerability. In the end, the simplest way I’ve found to say it is that it makes you more humane. And there’s nothing I want to feel more than I want to feel that.

            After an evening of stacking up pancakes and stacking up takeout containers that I emptied into my increasingly happy belly, I texted my sister that I loved her. I texted James that I loved him. I texted Lena. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what to text her. Then I texted to ask if she was free that week. Alex and James texted me back right away. They were always watching their phones for emergencies, like me. I was surprised when Lena texted me back right away, as well. She joked that she had taken me to her best place and now she was insecure. I said I would take her to my best place, and then she would never have to be insecure again. She said sounds perfect, and I could hear her smile in the text. I asked her to do lunch, so I was less likely to get dragged away into something dire, and got a date. I was grinning and stretched my back. I went before I could get sleepy to do a quick round of dishes. Otherwise, I thought they might end up sitting for weeks if things got wild again.

            I thought about Lena. I wondered what her past boyfriends were like. Were they anything like James? I couldn’t really picture them. The thought struck me that maybe she had past girlfriends. I felt a little abashed that I had been presumptuous about it before that moment. I never really asked her anything about her past relationships. I thought about her some more, things she had said, the way she was, things a little beyond words. I grew suddenly skeptical that she was even single. But she had never said anything about anyone, and I had to think the media would have covered that, no matter who it was. Unless she was really private about it for some reason, there wasn’t likely to be anyone. And Lena said she felt isolated and had no other friends nearby. That just didn’t make sense to me, because of how I felt about her. How could anyone else not feel the same? You know, I thought, Lena would definitely be an incredible catch, definitely someone worth wanting for yourself. I smiled at that thought.

            And, suddenly, it wasn’t a thought anymore. I could feel it in my own body, standing with my hips pressed against the counter. I recognized it as a part of me in a sudden flash that seemed perfectly clear in my mind.

            “Hm.”

            I heard myself make that one, sharp, deep grumble of a sound in my empty apartment. I stood still, the only movement that of the water rushing over my hands. Then I shook my head, and I kept going. I decided to, you know, keep calm and carry on. Was that just the sound of me coming out to myself? I had to wonder. Somehow, that’s not exactly how I had imagined that conversation with myself would go, not that I really imagined ever having that conversation with myself. Maybe it was just a fleeting thought. I had a big heart, after all. I was always testing its limits and boundaries, all the time. I had a wild imagination. That’s what empathy was in the end, a powerful way of imagining. I thought about Lena more to see if I could test this out a bit. And even right away, it began to feel less like an ephemeral idea passing through and taking on my shape for a moment and more like a real woman and a very familiar one - a woman of steel.


End file.
